seattle

Searching for a city that fits kind of feels like a warped version of the book Are You My Mother?, the lost, forlorn duckling asking incongruent animals whether she is of their ilk.

I am in much the same position, inquiring of inanimate objects and bureaucratic processes whether I am of them, if they are of me.

In the airport this translates into judgments passed on the efficiency of the baggage handling, ideosyncracy of the airport's layout; are they things with which I could become familiar, or is their exoticism destined to permanence?

Park of me feels that the Seattle I have conjured is the city of "Frasier," Singles and grunge. Some deeply rooted nostalgia for the early- to mid-nineties persists in my expectation of overly caffeinated and -educated, resolutely cosmopolitan flannel-clad bohemians.

new leaves

I suppose I have been a little lax in updating this regularly, so perhaps I should turn over a new leaf for the new semester and try to be more diligent. So therefore: my new found diligence follows

Locating oneself within an environment is a confluence of memory and anticipation, of knowing where one has come from and predicting where one is going. Because the continuum of occupation is necessarily, even in the abstract, time-based, speed becomes an integral factor in the construction of a narrative of urban experience. But what is the relationship, in the construction of perception and therefore meaning within the city, between spaces dedicated to linear speed and those dedicated to more long-term inhabitation?

Identifying predictive or anticipatory geometries within the two spaces of conflicting speeds generates a frame for these phenomena. The highway reveals its purpose of destination through the shape of its surface: roadways exist as not only the substrate of travel but also the horizon of its form serves as a datum to track one’s own movement. The horizon generates a space of predicted location, of anticipated geography, constructing a linear trajectory and relegating the landscape to the role of backdrop, one’s surroundings becoming incidental rather than meaningful. A sense of connectivity replaces the sense of place.

Within the city, on the other hand, location evolves out of memory imbedded within the landscape. The memories evoked need not be long-term, but can evolve through a singular experience of the built environment. Tracking one’s location through the movement of these static structures roots oneself within the environment, rather than alienating oneself from it. Following the changes in a single building as one moves not only indicates the path of travel through the city, but anchors the inhabitant within a necessarily spatial (rather than linear) matrix of location. Objects become three dimensional through their changes in time.

Mediating between these two realms of the experience of celerity and city then becomes a way to alleviate the deleterious effects of linear speed upon both the form of and the making of meaning within the city.

-me, my statement, wintersession 2009.


After my critique I really realized more that the basis of my fascination with the highway has less to do with the thing itself than a network of phenomena that surround it.

I went through my sketchbook and distilled the main ideas I have been looking at by finding key phrases I had vigorously capitalized, underlined, etc., particularly those that I think are relevant to my concept as I move on to spring. They are (in chronological order):

● tachocracy: rule of speed; implicates the switching off of subject functions as too slow, too
sensitive, negating subjectivity and narrative

● fantasy space: empty surface, screen for the projection of desires

● emergent forms: series of operations (typically the series belongs to a process) to distort an
Image

● narrative (story as it took place, even allegedly) versus plot (how the narrative is revealed)

● post-structualism: necessary incompleteness of the narrative; proliferating a reader-centric
structure / creation of meaning (interpretive; in contrast to author-driven and
prescriptive)

● connectivity and scale: the layering of landscape into fore- middle- and background, then
shifting their relationships in time to generate a variable sense of horizon with respect to landscape and time

● time, narrative and syntactic space: syntax with respect to events and time, environment
and space; the unfolding of subjective interpretations of one’s own environment becoming its own syntactic space? Narrative syntax?

I suppose what I am really interested in is creating a space of narrative within a space of speed, questioning the perception / definition of scale (can a narrative exist only on a personal scale? Is the highway totally devoid of the scale of natural human inhabitation?). Then, how can a varied concept of scale as a manifold condition (implicating scales of time, distance, dimension, speed, and occupied space) warp the narrative of the inhabitants of a space and how does the influence of each type of scale differ?

But then the question I have is: does this become a study of physical objects or theoretical constructs? I guess the former requires evidence from the latter and vice versa, but I am unsure of where the priority lies. So, I set up my preliminary go at a curriculum for spring based on a progression from “stuff” / the physical object to more intangible ideas. The progression will be as follows:

1. SCALE
Uncanny scale, intangibility: drawing the uncanny within scales of emptiness and landscape (i.e. Kansas & cinematography of In Cold Blood), size (industrial structures), and repetition / obsessiveness. What is the effect of scale on orientation? On the construction of a network of meaning?

2. SPEED
How does scale change as velocity does? What is it about the nature of the mechanics of
speed that requires such geometry?

3. SYNTAX
How does a change in scale, speed or geometry locate / disorient and in each case, what is
the nature of the resultant context (geographic, temporal, memory, anticipatory, etc)?

4. NARRATIVE
How do the three aforementioned properties combine to create varied narratives within the
landscape? What is consistent across narratives, and how can that be calibrated?

I envision these studies occurring concurrently; feeding off one another and existing as both support and contrast to the other entities. Each will have a representative of perhaps to diametrically opposed viewpoints or examples, yet the method of representation / graphics will remain consistent.

Let us reach out into the great (un)known to find (re-)(-re-)presentation.

ready, break!

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